Improve My Asset Management

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” —Jorge Luis Borges

My main asset is time. I’m putting a considerable effort into organizing my life in a way that allows me to decide about my time freely, and it has worked out quite nicely so far: I’m not necessarily wealthy in terms of dollars, but I’m quite wealthy in terms of freely available hours.

As of 2014, my general schedule includes 8 hours of technical writing each week, at whatever time I see fit, plus a 1-hour conference call every 14 days.

Everything else is negotiable.

I would pat myself on the back for this, if it wasn’t for one thing: Just like owning a lot of money makes you spend it on ridiculousstuff, owning a lot of free time has similar consequences: If you don’t make a conscious effort, you don’t spend it wisely anymore.

Full disclosure: My own understanding of “spending time wisely” may strike you as being just as frivolous as buying annoying Italian roadsters or – God forbid – gold watches. That said, we can probably agree on some not-all-so-wise uses of time, as in:

Hence, this proposal: Improve my asset management. Time being my main asset, this could be seen as mainstream time management. But it’s not: One of my main goals is to have enough unstructured time that flows freely (and allows me to do whatever I feel like at the moment). A strictly planned workday couldn’t be farther from my idea of the perfect lifestyle.

As so often, a goal that’s far from being clear-cut black and white. The good thing: I feel that merely being conscious about it is already making a difference.

Oh, god! Bad movies! I recently saw 6 of those in a single day, and I don’t understand how it even happened. I’m pretty good with the rest of time management, I know where my time goes and I rarely go “Oh! Where did the past 3 hours go?” unless I’m out with friends.

But bad movies… The thing with bad movies (at least when you’re watching at home) is that you KNOW that there are other good movies out there, and to remedy this bad movie you just saw, you watch another, until you end up at 6 movies in one day.

Lol, 6 in a day is pretty impressive! Sounds a lot like the sunk cost fallacy which we easily fall prey to. I personally can’t watch more than one or two a day, though, or I’ll just fall asleep… which also happens with good movies occasionally, to be honest. ;)